For those who associate the author with gothic thrillers, this is more of a straightforward romance, if slightly more literary and less spicy. It includes a lot of golden-age Hollywood references for classic film buffs, and generally succeeds at capturing the atmosphere and "types" of the period.
The characters and settings are vivid, if sometimes one-dimensional. The pacing lags in spots (villain Nancy is well established early on and the length could do with less of her). Otherwise, this will probably appeal to the authors' fans and maybe fans of books like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.
Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the arc.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is an author that I can confidently pick up and know I'll enjoy. The Seventh Veil of Salome does not disappoint. Moreno-Garcia effortlessly steps between different time periods and weaves together a memorable story. I highly recommend this one. Oh, and the cover art is always gorgeous.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read a digital advanced copy.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is an auto request for me. She has proven herself across genres, repeatedly turning out new stories that are each fully engrossing.

This felt like a mix of Daisy Jones and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo in format. There's two main POVs, Vera and Nancy, with interviews of the supporting characters throughout. It tackles both the Mexican American experience in LA during the time as well as immigrant experience (Vera is discovered in Mexico but has family members that already live here). There's as many layers to this story as there are veils and I love that you get Salomes POV here as though it's the movie script.

Anyway, the characters jump off the page, the sense of place and setting is fantastic as always and it's a real page turner. Recommended.

The Seventh Veil of Salome tells the story of three women, Salome of historical infamy, Nancy a never was failed actress trying to survive in Hollywood and Vera, a young Mexican woman plucked from obscurity to be the lead actress in a new film about Salome.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House/Del Ray for the opportunity to read and review this book which I am giving 5 stars.

I absolutely loved this book in devoured it in only a day or two. I have always loved Old Hollywood and stories about Old Hollywood and this hit the mark for that era so perfectly. If you are a fan of films like Sunset Boulevard or LA Confidential then this book would be perfect for you. Nancy (the Norma Desmond) of this book is so well written as they stereotypical wannabe starlet who thinks all her failures are the fault of someone else. Her racism and abusive behaviors make her a good villain that its to root for her downfall (but will it actually happen?)

I loved Vera as the main character, she was well written, likable, strong when she needed to be and willing to stand up for herself. There were several times during the story that I found myself truly worried about what was about to happen to her so I think you can say that I definitely grew to care about her character.

I will absolutely recommend this book to others, I will be purchasing a copy of this book for my home library and I will be posting about this book on my social media (TikTok and YouTube) prior to its release date in July. One bit of warning to other fans of Silvia Moreno-Garcia that this book does not contain supernatural elements. I know that this may be a bit expected with this authors books at this point, but believe me the book doesn't suffer at all by not having any of those elements.

I have read everything that Silvia Moreno-Garcia has written and will continue to do so. The way she writes her characters-even villains like Nancy-is so compelling and makes them 3 dimensional, real people. Absolutely stunning.

The Seventh Veil of Salome is a captivating and thought-provoking novel that intertwines the lives of three women in different eras. The author, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, masterfully weaves together the stories of Salome, Vera, and Nancy, giving us a unique and insightful perspective on each of their lives.
One of the most intriguing aspects of this book is the author's interpretation of the life of Salome. Through her vivid descriptions and compelling narrative, the author brings to life the character of Salome and sheds light on the events that shaped her into the woman she became. Then we have the two actresses, Vera and Nancy, who have roles in a 1950s movie about Salome. The author skillfully shows the similarities between these three women, despite the different time eras they live in. It is fascinating to see how family and our surroundings shape us and our decisions.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Seventh Veil of Salome and found myself completely immersed in the story. The characters were well-developed and relatable, and their struggles and triumphs felt authentic. The writing was beautiful and evocative, transporting me to different periods and settings.

Overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a captivating and thought-provoking read. The Seventh Veil of Salome is a powerful exploration of women's lives and the impact of our surroundings on our identities. Kudos to the author for writing such a compelling and moving novel. I cannot wait to read more from this talented author.
Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for an e-arc in exchange for an unbiased review.

Thank you to NetGalley, Random House/Del Rey and Silvia Moreno-Garcia for this ARC in exchange for an opportunity to share my thoughts.

Another gripping novel by SMG that I was eager to get my hands on when I’d first caught sight of it on NetGalley. I love anything old Hollywood and don’t let the cover fool you, this is much more than a tale of romance. Nancy Hartley was by far the most infuriating character and hats off to Silvia for making my new personal fictitious enemy. It floats between multiple POV’s from our beloved Vera, Salome, Nancy and people on the set.

The dichotomy between the two main women is, in my opinion, really cool. They both represent different versions of Salome-Nancy being the vain and callous Salome, while Vera is the innocent and sweet girl Salome is portrayed in some pieces of media. I ventured to read Oscar Wilde’s short play just to better acquaint myself as I knew very little about this biblical tale. I think if an author can command you to want to know more about what they’re writing, job well done!

SMG proves to be a versatile author and this being a shining example. Writing horror thrillers, romance and historical dramas is no small feat, yet she does it effortlessly!

Thank you to NetGalley for providing this arc in return for honest feedback.

I went into this story not knowing what it would be about. I had heard great things about the author and wanted to delve into her work.

I was absolutely stunned by how much I thoroughly enjoyed this novel from beginning to end. From the first page, I was absolutely mesmerized. I simply could not put this book down. The style of narration tied into the parallel stories of Vera and Salome were written phenomenally. I felt for Vera as she was trying to find her way amidst the prejudices against her. Oh how I loathed Nancy but in the best way possible. She made the perfect antagonist. Add Jay's character as the rich "pretty boy" and we have an amazing cast of characters. The story of Salome had me refreshing my mind on this Judean portion of history. I love how Moreno-Garcia depicted what had occurred.

The setting for the story and the addition of familiar old Hollywood names provided a beautiful layout for this phenomenal. story.

I will be preordering this novel for myself and as a gift for my sibling.

Thank you again NetGalley for allowing me to read this 5 plus star masterpiece.

my god, another hit from silvia moreno-garcia. i genuinely think she's the most versatile genre writer out there currently, due in no small part to her refusal to write simple crowd-pleasers. her books are complicated, which some find bitter or sour, but i never do. she's just phenomenal. can't help but feel this is her response to the institution of evelyn hugo and perhaps an urge to return to noir style stories. she's unable to miss.

This felt different from other SMG books, but in a really good way! There are 3 characters whose stories are told through two narratives. There is no supernatural/horror element, but there was still "real world" horror such as racism and sexism. This is one story that I will likely need to read again.

Also, this cover is stunning and I can't get over it!

All is not as it appears in this surprisingly contemporary historical novel by Silvia Moreno-Garcia where three different women fight for their survival in a world dominated by the men around them and will ultimately end up forging their own destinies in fame or infamy. As sumptuous as it is intoxicating, The Seventh Veil of Salome by SMG sucks you into the Golden Age of Hollywood where actors are living in a dreamy illusion of grandeur and luxury, but we soon learn that even the most gilded of dreams can tarnish, becoming indistinguishable from devastating tragedy.

Vera Larios is a debut actress. She is plucked from obscurity---she’s supposed to be a nobody, arisen from nothing. However, she’s everything the explosive director, Max Niemann, has ever coveted for the only remaining role yet to be cast in his newest and much anticipated film, The Seventh Veil of Salome. To begin with, Vera is this obedient, polite, and decorous individual, but along the way she finds her voice, which quickly reveals a more confident, assertive, and autonomous version of herself. She’s also able to uproot a deeply embedded conviction, planted and carefully cultivated by her mother, that she will never be enough compared to her more fair, more beautiful, more talented sister. These character transformations eventually help her move beyond a bad case of imposter syndrome, one that develops from self-deprecating guilt she harbors due to the alienating belief that she is living her sister’s life.

Nancy Hartley is no new player on the board in Hollywood but is so desperate to make it as a big actress, she is consumed by her own jealousy and avarice. Vera Larios becomes the expected target of her ire, and Nancy is an adversary you love to hate. Racist, impulsive, and living on the scraps she’s been thrown from the tables of Hollywood legends for far too long, she’s a woman possessed with a single-minded purpose to accomplish her life’s dream of stardom, ostensibly at any cost. The harder she tries to regain some measure of control in her quickly spiraling career, the greater amount of damage she inflicts upon her situation. With the devasting losses mounting and failure looming, she ends up condemning Vera, which only succeeds in whipping her anguish and rage into a murderous passion.

Princess Salome is a woman plucked from the very pages of the bible. Her character is strong, clever, resilient, and resourceful---all things she must be to survive in biblical antiquity. She is caught in a web of her own desire, and as always, women can never have it all, so she must sacrifice everything to fulfill only one of them. Will it be love, vengeance, or power Salome decides she must have beyond all else? Dependent upon what she chooses, her fate will be paired with Jakanaan to indulge the love she has for this heretical preacher, her usurping Uncle Herod to exact her burning vengeance in the name of her murdered father, or her cousin Marcus Agrippa and the power he represents to seize her rightful crown and title.

Interestingly, aspects of Salome’s character will have significant influence over how both Vera and Nancy evolve and the resulting fateful decisions they make in their own lives. What disturbs me is the story of Salome, set during biblical times, is still so applicable to what these women are going through during 1950’s Hollywood. These women are cherry picked by men, stripped of their identities, assigned new names, new personas, and new backstories to make them more marketable towards the white male gaze. They are told who to be with and where, what to think or not to think at all, how to dress, how to eat, and what to say. Both Vera and Nancy contend with conflicting demands from all sides. Men in the industry are doing their best to coerce and program them to become Hollywood starlets, responsible for ushering in a new era of filmmaking, but their families are mounting increasingly higher expectations for them to attain this success and settle down for a properly deadened, mechanical existence as homemakers, housewives, and mothers. Salome is alive during a time where everything is chosen for women by men, even their very thoughts are carefully manufactured to be congruent with the politics of the patriarchy. Horrifically, they must all smile through it, becoming women they are not, all the while silently raging for their stolen freedoms.

All three of these women are fighting to be heard and to be seen, for agency and identity, and to oversee their own lives. These women are in a pressure cooker that will either burn them up or force them to confront who they are at their cores and what they are willing to sacrifice to achieve their hearts’ desires.

Whew! Now that I have properly captured these awesome characters and given you my summary and analysis, I can talk a little bit more informally on just a few more of my thoughts. First, Silvia Moreno-Garcia is such a versatile chameleon! She has a toe dipped in multiple different genres, and each time she is able to flawlessly and effortlessly deliver bestselling titles. She is one of my favorite authors, and I love how she’s able to immerse you in her story telling. When I saw that this book was in the works, I was beside myself with excitement---I mean come on, set in old Hollywood with promised drama on and off the screen, sign me up immediately!! Normally I am not usually a fan of numerous shifting points of view, but how it’s done is not confusing, gives context seasoned with a dash of foreshadowing, and helps drive the story forward. I also really enjoyed getting to know these women and follow them along their stories. I really, reallyyy love to hate Nancy, and I get the impression that she’s written to be that dislikable, but I also think I understand her. What would I do in her situation? That soul consuming desperation can fuel the rashest of decisions and feed the deepest, darkest parts of human nature like nothing else. Salome….oh my goodness! Big fan over here. She finally has enough of obedience and oppression and takes what she needs to cleverly gain the upper hand against her uncle and secure her own future. She is celebrated by her own mother for her brazen act at the end of the book, but no one realizes that a campaign of bloody retribution has likely just begun…

Thank you so so much to NetGalley and Random House/Del Rey for the ARC and the opportunity to share what I think! I have already posted my review to both my Goodreads and Facebook Group (The Book Banquet), but I will also be posting my review to my Amazon and B & N on publication day.

A 3.5 star read I'm rounding up. Of the four SMG books I’ve read, this is my least favorite. But it was still entertaining and well-written, as all SMG books are.

Everything was a little too surface level for this book to truly resonate with me. Lots of different POVs and plot threads and stories. Too many things going on for us to really delve deep with any one character.

Vera’s naïveté and too good for this world personality began to grate a bit. She never seemed to truly change and grow in the way naïve Nina, of The Beautiful Ones (my favorite SMG book), did. She was just lacking a bit in the depth department.

And Nancy, the villain, wasn’t exciting in the scene-stealing way I found Valerie from The Beautiful Ones to be. She was sort just of erratic and over the top.

Both Vera and Nancy’s storylines, in and of themselves, were plenty entertaining and interesting. And I really liked how SMG delved into the many forms of racism and sexism Vera faced. These moments were visceral and painful and well-depicted.

The situations these characters found themselves in were compelling, but the characters themselves? Not so much. Which is something I’ve never experienced with a SMG story before; I usually find her main characters quite interesting.

The third main POV character was Salome, the biblical character. Her story was the most intriguing to me for the first 30% of the book, but I quickly found myself wishing the pages dedicated to her story could have been given to making Vera a more fleshed out, three-dimensional character.

And the ending! I wish we’d gotten one more Vera POV chapter.

This is not a book I’ll likely remember a ton about a year from now, but it was compulsively readable all the same.

I really enjoyed this overall. I'm a fan of Silvia Moreno-Garcia's work in general and I'm always impressed at how deftly she writes across so many different styles and genres. Her previous novel, Silver Nitrate, delved into the film editing industry in Mexico in the 1990s, so it was interesting to me that this one is also set in the film industry, though now we get to see the glory days of Hollywood during their "Sword & Sandal" heyday.

The novel is told through three different POVs and starts off pseudo-documentary style, with different people being interviewed, and we know that some big "incident" occured but not what that was. But most of the book is from three viewpoints:

- Vera Larios: an unknown from Mexico who was plucked from her job as a front desk assistant to star in a blockbuster movie about Salome, a mysterious woman from Biblical times. She's thrown right into the Hollywood machine. She's got a major case of imposter syndrome, assisted by her mom constantly comparing her to her much more glamorous sister who was supposed to be the star of the family. I felt most connected to this story. She starts off naive and unsure of herself, and is thrown right into the racism and misogyny of Hollywood, but even from the beginning the reader can sense she has a strong core.

- Nancy: a wannabe starlet who has been in Hollywood for a while but can't seem to catch a break. I know we're supposed to hate her, but I wish she hadn't been written QUITE so much as a horrible, vindictive narcissist. I sense the system broke her and had a hand in turning her into this person, but I had a hard time mustering up any sort of sympathy for her because she was just such a terrible person in every way.

- Salome: at first I was skeptical that this storyline was included, it felt so different from all the others and I wasn't sure where it fit in, but I was won over by the end. Salome really is both women in the story, or maybe even every woman. She's caught in a golden cage and there really are no good options for her. Every choice is terrible for its own reasons but she has to make one.

By the end of the novel all three women's stories begin to feel parallel in a lot of ways. They are all coming of age and trying to assert their power in the limited ways their surroundings will let them.

It seems unfair to compare this to other SMG novels because she has set the bar SO high, but as far as drama and tension go, this one is not quite at the same height as some of her other novels for me. For the most part, we know something bad is going to happen, but I wouldn't say my heart was in my throat at any point in the story really except towards the very end. It was still an enjoyable ride, would recommend for anyone interested in Old Hollywood and behind-the-scenes celebrity drama.

This book merges the new testament era character of salome and 50s hollywood by making a movie about salome, a femme fatale, and taking 3 main characters that have more in common that you’d think: salome, vera and nancy
i think that as a reader it can be confusing to have multiple povs that changed from bible times to golden age hollywood, it can take a while to get into it and understand the pace and writing style of the author but once i did i was so into it, i think that vera is the most likeable character and it was really interesting seeing how hollywood wasn’t all glamour and glory specially for a woman of color
her insecurities and doubts made her feel so human and relatable and as the clear villain of the story you can’t help but hate nancy i understood where she came from but i really had no sympathy for her
i would’ve loved to have one last pov of vera to see what she was feeling by the ending of the book it felt incomplete to end with the last chapter she had

I am so honored to have received a copy of this arc! I love what this author does I think each book is completely a standalone in premise and genre. I loved the documentary style elements. What a good blend of women’s fiction, gothic setting and supernatural elements

gorgeous historical fiction about Salome, as ewell as about Hollywood. Moreno-Garcia has done it again! thanks for the arc

I’m very torn about this book and that’s why I gave it three stars my feelings are somewhere in the middle. I loved the idea of reading a story about old Hollywood in the 50s involving a young bright young actress in the lead role of a blockbuster movie telling the infamous story of Salome and John the Baptist and the B, maybe C level actress needing that one big role to finally make a name for herself and the drama surrounding that. Who wouldn’t want to read that? I know I would have preferred to read Salome alone and not the acting drama. Usually separate storyline in books don’t bother me usually but it didn’t work in this case.

Vera was a bit too naive for Hollywood. Nancy and her associates were such unsavory characters. I did not care for her at all and would skip over her scenes because her behavior became too maddening and erratic especially near toward the end. And don’t get me started on Vera’s mother…

I did enjoy the book overall but it didn’t have the WOW I was expecting from it.

I'd like to thank the publisher and NetGalley for giving me an approval.

I'm a huge Sunset Boulevard fan, and a lowkey opera fan, so reading this book was like a combination of the two things I'd love. Cinema and opera. However, in the end, I think my expectations were way too high for this.

The plot has two narratives, one seems to be in interview format with various people involved or around during the time of the film. The other is a retelling of the tale of Salome. I liked the characters, and I liked what we got of the Salome character, but I felt the story was too... bland? I wasn't gritty enough for 1940/1950 Hollywood. The Salome tale was also bland as well, and didn't seem to mesh well with the Hollywood narrative. To be honest, I think if the author chose one narrative (either one) it would be a better book. That's just me.

There are nods to various actors, films, and research done here and there, but the characters just didn't have that emotional depth that they existed outside what we saw them go through based on what the author wrote. A to B narrative at work, which is sad because again - both stories have depth to them.

It's hard for me, as a film noir and opera fan to check my bias at the door, but I really wanted something meatier and far more dramatic than what was written. The sky was the limit since the author was basing off something that didn't exist but it was too tame.

It took me about 84% for me to become full invested in this story. An extremely slow build with all the action happening in the last 20% seems to be Moreno-Garcia's M.O. The two other books I've read from her had the exact same structure with a lot of character work and not a lot of plot. Even though this is not my favorite story structure I like what Moreno-Garcia generally does with her stories. That said, I've never truly loved one of her books.

I really only enjoyed the "present" timeline and skipped most of Salome's POV chapters. I really loved Vera and wished we got the entire book just from her narrative POV. If you're looking for old Hollywood vibes I think this one does a pretty good job.

This is the kind of book that I spend all my time searching for. Reading this beautifully written and absolutely unforgettable story is an experience that will stay with me forever.